In the midst of his cogitations the door was opened by one of his clerks, who acquainted him with the fact that Colonel Reed was without and wanted to see him. The announcement came upon him so unexpectedly that his color rose, and it was with an effort that he composed his face to greet the visitor. A disturbing presentiment of something unpleasant seized upon him. Never before had Colonel Reed entered or suggested entering his office. "What does the old man want?" he thought testily, as he bade the clerk show him in. A moment later the colonel entered. He was suave and smiling. There was nothing of the broken financier, the ruined millionaire, in his buoyant and almost patronizing manner. His old black coat, faded and many years behind the mode, but well brushed and carefully mended, was buttoned up closely, and still sat upon his thin but sinewy figure with something of its old-time elegance. In one hand he carried a little black lacquer cane. Sitting down opposite John Gault, where the light of the long window fell full upon his face, he had all the assurance of manner of a man whose bonanza has not become a memory and a dream. "I was going by, and I thought I'd drop in and pass the time of day," he said. "Things aren't as lively with me just now as they have been. It's an off season." "It's that with most of us," said the other, regarding him intently and wondering what he had come for. "All in the same coffin, are we?" said the colonel, airily. "I'm generally on the full jump down here of a morning; but lately--" He shrugged his shoulders and flung out his hands with a gesture of hopeless acquiescence in unmerited bad luck. "You're fortunate," said Gault, "to have something to be on the full jump about. We find things pretty slow." "Oh, of course, in comparison with the past," assented the old man. "Slow? Slow is not the word. Dead, my dear friend! San Francisco is a dead city--dead as Pompeii." "Well, not quite as bad as that," said Gault, laughing in spite of himself. "How should you be able to judge?" retorted the colonel. "You weren't thought of when we old fellows were laying out the town. There was more life here in a minute then than there is now in a week. Then Portsmouth Square was the plaza and the center of the city, with a line of French boot-blacks along the lower side. We used to try our French on 'em every time we got a shine. And Lord! what smart fellows they were, and how much money they made!" "So I've heard," murmured Gault. "And when I think of this street later on, this street alone, in, say, '70--how it boiled and bubbled and sizzled with life! Those were the days to live in!" "Undoubtedly," acquiesced the listener. He was afraid the colonel had only come to continue the reminiscences on the historic ground of his early gains and losses, and he ran over in his mind the excuses he could use to politely and speedily get rid of the old man. But the colonel, it appeared, had another end in view.